Creating inefficient IT, or hiding our own inefficiency behind IT

We, humans, normally have brains, and a heart, and we should use them more.

More and more administrative services (banking, medical, government, insurance, deliveries…) are handled by a ticketing system or worse, a chat bot. How many times do we need to get enraged by those systems before we come up with a system that answers better client’s needs?

Technical problems that feed on themselves

You are barred from your online banking system, because you replaced your old broken smartphone by a new one. To access your online account, you need to setup an authenticated account on your smartphone. This requires a picture of your identity card, but for some obscure reason, your smartphone refuses to attach the picture to the form.

Yes, this scenario happened, more or less.

Human and/or management based issues

How many times have we received stupid answers to our questions, and the ticket was closed, leaving us with our eyes to cry? Ah ha, want a juicy example?

Recently, I asked my health insurance company about coverage abroad, using a concrete example: ‘I spend 100 euros in Switzerland for a consultation, how much will I be reimbursed?’
- Response 1: We top up in relation to Social Security.
- Response 2: We top up based on the French system.
- Response 3: It depends on your contract.
None of the three responses gave me a range of reimbursement, and each time the ticket was closed, and I had to wait 10 days for each reply.

In some cases, the issue comes from us — true — because our question is unclear.

Closing tickets

In some other cases, the root of the issue is people care about closing the ticket, not helping you. That’s where I say we should use our heart. By the way, management metrics where employee efficiency is measured by the number of tickets are baaad and lead to this sort of attitude.

Quick and dirty

Finally, in yet other cases, the issue lies in the fact that the person who answers is lazy. Especially in ticketing services, you have a different person each time. So, why take time and really address the issue in an intelligent manner when the issue will land to another colleague, hmm? Why fix the root of a technical problem (long), when you can do a quick and dirty fix? Yes, this is a question of using our brains, but it’s also often a question which involves our guidelines and management. If you are always on pressure, you’ll go for quick and dirty solutions, but they don’t last.

Efficiency of chat bots, FAQ etc

I’d say that FAQ answers 1 question in 4 that I may have. Most of the time, I know from the beginning if the question is likely to have an answer in the FAQ or not.

I don’t think I have ever come cross an efficient chat bot. They just make me crazy 😉. But with AI progress, I have reasonably good expectations on AI-powered chat bots becoming more useful, especially to non-technical people.

IMHO, we spend far too much money on designing chat bots or “intelligent” search engines. Are we blind? Is it because they’re funny to implement? We’d certainly be better off directly talking to a human being…

Customer satisfaction programs are deceptive

How many customer satisfaction surveys have we answered? … and how many times have they changed anything? I tend to think that the surveys are not done for the customer, but for marketing departments to express metrics on their slides “our customers are happy at 97.8%” etc. Not to mention we have no control on the produced percentage, and very often the survey doesn’t ask any question on the parts you’d really like to comment…

Dream line

We need more help desk solutions where we can talk to a human.

We need our interlocutor to be the same for a given case (possibly for a given customer), so that we don’t have to go through the entire issue again and again.

We want the person we speak to to wish to help us out. If we are seeking for help, we are not looking for a rigid, formatted answer. We are looking for a compromise, a solution, an idea. That’s the sort of thing we get from a human being, not a chat bot nor an automated system.

— Cryptax, human for ever, even in front of my beloved computer.

Disclaimer. My blog posts are not related to my work, my employer, but to my personal experience as a human being…